Milwaukee Serial Killer Jeffrey Dahmer
Jeffrey Dahmer is one of the most well-known serial killers. His case is one of the most disturbing ones because of how he killed his victims. Dahmer was a very twisted individual, and the way that he acted in life makes many wonder how he wasn’t caught earlier. He murdered 17 males between 1978 and 1991, and Dahmer said himself that what he did was horrible and that he deserved to die for it.
Dahmer was born in 1960, and after he had surgery to correct a double hernia when he was four, he became very withdrawn from others. In his teens, he had little to no friends, and he was disengaged from his family. Dahmer said that his urges to murder started around the age of 14, and it’s debated whether these urges could have been handled if his family would have sought out mental help for his behavior. As he got older, he developed a drinking problem, and he enlisted in the army in 1978 after his father pushed him to. He was discharged from the army in 1981. After returning to Ohio, he was arrested two different times for situations involving disorderly conduct, one of them being him doing sexual acts in front of two young boys.
His Victims
Dahmer would lure his victims to his home with promises of sex, and then he would strangle them to death. He would then proceed to do sexual acts with them after, and he even kept body parts to remember the events. His first known murder happened in 1978 when he picked up Steven Hicks and took him back to his house. He got Hicks drunk and then killed him when he tried to leave, dismembering him after. He didn’t take his second victim until 1987. He got Steven Tuomi drunk, and woke up to him being dead, stating that he doesn’t remember what happened. He took Tuomi’s body to his grandmother's house where he dismembered him and did sexual acts. He killed two other victims in his grandmother's house before she kicked him out due to late-night drunkenness in 1988.
In 1989, an encounter with a 13-year-old boy resulted in sexual assault charges for Dahmer. He pleaded guilty stating that the boy looked much older. While awaiting sentencing for his case, he lured Anthony Sears to his grandmother’s basement where he killed and dismembered him. In his court case, he insisted that the arrest marked a turning point in his life, and the judge agreed to let Dahmer work at his day job and return to prison at night.
In 1991, Dahmer’s neighbor called the police to report an Asian boy running naked in the street. Dahmer told them that he was his 19-year-old drunken lover, and the police let the 14-year-old boy return home with Dahmer, where he was then killed. Dahmer’s case is especially sad after realizing that the police could have stopped his activities much sooner than when he was finally convicted. Police neglect allowed a 14-year-old and many others to die.
The known victims that Dahmer killed were Stephen Hicks, Steven Tuomi, James Doxtator, Richard Guerrero, Anthony Sears, Anthony Sears, Eddie Smith, Ricky Beeks, Ernest Miller, David Thomas, Curtis Straughter, Errol Lindsey, Tony Hughes, Konerak Sinthasomphone, Matt Turner, Jeremiah Weinberger, Oliver Lacy, and Joseph Bradehoft. Many of his victims were teenagers.
How He Was Caught
Two Milwaukee police officers came to Dahmer’s house after finding Tracy Edwards, who was handcuffed and claimed that Dahmer had drugged him. The officers went to Dahmer’s apartment where they found photos of dismembered bodies and body parts in his refrigerator. Dahmer’s trial began in 1992, and because lots of his victims were Black, there was racial tension. Having only one Black member on the jury caused outrage from many. Dahmer initially pleaded to be found not guilty despite confessing to killing during police interrogations. He then changed his plea to guilty by virtue of insanity.
The jury decided that Dahmer knew that his acts were evil and decided to commit them anyway. Thus, they found him guilty, but sane, on all counts. He was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms in prison. He was initially kept away from others in prison, but he convinced authorities to let him integrate with other inmates. He was killed by his fellow inmate Christopher Scarver on November 28, 1994.
In 2015, Scarver had told the New York Post his reasons for killing Dahmer. He said that he was disturbed by Dahmer’s crimes and that Dahmer would mold his prison food into severed limbs to antagonize his fellow inmates. After being taunted by Dahmer and another inmate, he beat them both to death. He claimed that prison guards knew what he was doing but left him alone during that time.
Could He Have Been Caught Sooner?
Many details of Dahmer’s story indicate neglect from his family and police to take care of the issue sooner. Since he clearly grew up mentally unwell, taking the time to try and help his mental health issues may have prevented some of these incidents from happening. He had known issues with alcoholism and being inappropriate, but nobody did anything to try and help overcome these problems. The police also neglectfully let these incidents go on for too long. A young boy escaped from Dahmer’s home, and instead of doing a full investigation of his apartment where they would have found dismembered body parts a year earlier than they did, they let the boy return to Dahmer’s home to be murdered.
Dahmer’s case brings up the question of how police handle things. While it’s evident that they didn’t do a great job of handling cases decades ago, many people still think that it’s evident even now during the present day. Do they do a good job of trying to catch murderers, or do they let people go free due to neglect? It’s a much larger topic that would need lots of research on specific cases to determine. Dahmer was a sick and twisted individual, and it’s a shame that nobody caught him sooner before all of his murders took place.